What is Cuckoo about?
Cuckoo is a very strange coming of age story, where the 17-year-old Gretchen has to confront her grief over her mom’s passing as well as the difficulty in accepting her father’s new family and her place in it. She views her half-sister, Alma, as an intruder, while also feeling like one herself. All of that is defamiliarized through her confrontation with the Hooded Woman and Herr König, who serve as externalized, dramatized versions of her mom and dad.
Cast
- Gretchen – Hunter Schafer
- Luis – Marton Csokas
- Beth – Jessica Henwick
- Alma – Mila Lieu
- Herr König – Dan Stevens
- Henry – Jan Bluthardt
- Trixie – Greta Fernández
- Erik – Konrad Singer
- Ed – Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey
- Dr. Bonomo – Proschat Madani
- The Hooded Woman – Kalin Morrow
- Younger Cuckoo – Matthea Lára Pedersen
- Written by – Tilman Singer
- Directed by – Tilman Singer
How to understand Cuckoo
The main thing to remember, especially about horror
When dealing with stories, we’re essentially tasked with thinking on two levels. Literal and representational. That’s most obvious when you hear a parable or fable. For example, “The Scorpion and the Frog”. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across a pond. Frog says “No, you’ll sting me.” Scorpion promises, “I won’t sting you. If I did, we’d both drown.” So the frog lets the scorpion on its back and starts to go across the pond. Then it feels a piercing heat. “Why break your promise? Why doom yourself?” And the scorpion says, “It’s just my nature.”
When we hear a story like that, we apply it to life and understand that it represents how people treat each other. You’ve likely been the frog. You’ve likely been the scorpion. Or at least know people you would classify as frogs and scorpions. A basic real world example would be picking up someone hitchhiking on the highway. It’s possible nothing bad will happen. But it’s also possible that, despite your good deed, you get stung. Not because the person doesn’t appreciate your kindness, but because they have the opportunity.
Movies are similar but have a lot more going on than a simple fable, so it can be harder to parse out what’s being said. The thing to keep in mind is that the literal aspects of the plot often aren’t as important as what the plot represents. For example, in Cuckoo, someone might question the believability of cuckoo people and Herr König’s “preservation” of them. You can get lost in asking about the motivation of the parents and why they trust König so much. All of that relates to the literal aspects of the story. But they aren’t really important when talking about what the story means.
2001: a Space Odyssey, for example, is often described as one of the most confusing movies ever. But when you stop looking at it literally and step back, what you see is a very simple story about the relationship humans have with technology. The last scene, when a character becomes “imprisoned” by aliens then dies then is reborn as a giant baby that travels through space, is what often confounds people the most. But it represents the end of one era of humanity and this idea that we will start a new chapter in our development. That’s all.
Same thing with something like The Shining. As confounding as the literal aspects of that movie can be. It becomes much simpler when you understand it’s about alcoholism/addiction. All the supernatural stuff dramatizes the experience of cravings, relapse, the seeming duality of personality when someone’s sober versus intoxicated, the violence that can occur, and the existential destruction of the family that’s often a byproduct (by that, I mean divorce/separation). Explaining all of that in a literal way isn’t the point of the movie. The point is to represent this thing people go through in a way that captures how horrific the experience can be.
Cuckoo on the literal level
For Cuckoo, the literal level is that these cuckoo people exist. König and others have taken it upon themselves to preserve these creatures, no matter the human cost. They use the resort as a way to raise funds but also carry out the cuckoo mating process. A cuckoo will use its vocalizations and strength to incapacitate people, then it pulls eggs from itself, puts those into a host mother (a process known as brood parasitism), then leaves. The host mother, not remembering the encounter, becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby cuckoo-person who looks like the host (part of the survival mechanism). The host raises the baby, until the child reaches a certain age, then König invites the family back to the resort and claims the child.
Gretchen is 17. Her parents divorced at least 8 years earlier. She lived with her mom. Her dad remarried Beth and had Alma. Gretchen’s mom recently passed. So she’s gone to live with her father.
Henry and his wife had been, sometime in the near past, guests at the resort. The cuckoo woman had shown up, incapacitated them both, then impregnated Henry’s wife. Except no one rolled her onto her side. So when she vomited, she choked. Henry survived because cuckoo people don’t actually kill their hosts. He’s been trying to figure out what’s been going on ever since.
The movie opens with another cuckoo-person leaving a home (at the resort?), seemingly overwhelmed by her “parents” fighting. The “dad” calls König. We get a statement about how the mother will be harder to control without a nestling. So König calls Gretchen’s dad and mom, hoping to bring Alma in, providing a new nestling for the cuckoo mother.
The cuckoo is obsessed with Gretchen for one of two reasons. It’s either because she desires a new nestling so is desperate to impregnate fresh hosts. Or because she views Gretchen as a resource-competition for Alma so wants to eliminate Gretchen. If it’s the latter, that would explain why Alma, early in the film, under the mother’s hypnosis, attacks Gretchen. “Take out your competition”.
König’s plan, once he kidnapped Gretchen, was to keep her as a host for the teenage cuckoo-person from the film’s opening. As he already had that room as part of his house, it seems this was probably something he had done before, maybe even regularly.
Cuckoo on the representative level
Once we get past the literal, what Cuckoo’s really about is how we identify family. Traditionally, that’s by blood. But what happens when parents divorce, remarry, and create new hybrid families? When does a stepparent go from “My dad’s new wife” to “my stepmom” to “my mom”? When does a stepsibling go from “my mom’s stepson” to “my stepbrother” to “my brother”?
That’s where the cuckoo metaphor comes in. Cuckoos are, as the movie tells us, brood parasites. Some cuckoos will lay their eggs in nests belonging to other birds. When the egg hatches, the other bird will feed the cuckoo chick as one of its own. Even when the cuckoo looks nothing like the foster parent.
So early in Cuckoo, Gretchen tells people that Alma is not her sister. Even though they’re supposedly half-siblings. Not having both of the same parents, being different races, being nearly 10 years apart in age, and not spending much time together means that Gretchen rejects Alma. She views the younger girl as an invader. Especially when it comes to her father’s attention and affection.
Cuckoo doesn’t dive into it too much but a similar thing happens with Beth in terms of Gretchen. Beth doesn’t view Gretchen as her daughter. She’s polite but not trying to be Gretchen’s new mom. The title, Cuckoo, applies to both Alma and Gretchen, depending on perspective.
By the end of Cuckoo, Gretchen claims Alma as a sister. That’s the full arc and purpose of the movie. On the literal level, Alma’s actually not Gretchen’s half-sister but an entirely different species. But metaphorically, the whole other species thing is just a dramatization of Alma not being a sister in the traditional sense. Gretchen hadn’t viewed Alma as her sister and now does. That’s the crux of it all.
Gretchen’s grief
It feels like every modern horror film has to have some subplot around grief. Cuckoo’s no different. Gretchen still mourns the loss of her mom. Her calling the answering machine over and over again serves as an externalization of her inability to let go. And how one-sided the relationship now is. It’s a call the mom will never answer, a message she’ll never respond to.
One of the key techniques of horror movies is externalizing things like grief or alcoholism (per our previous conversation about The Shining). The monster tends to embody something relevant to the character and give what’s typically intangible or internal a physical form. In the case of Cuckoo, Gretchen’s issue is her grief over her mom and her rejection of Alma because Alma has a different mom. So it makes sense that the “monster” is this cuckoo mother. Gretchen’s mother had meant so much to her, continues to mean so much to her, to the point of becoming an impediment in her life, the cause of her grief and depression. So defeating the cuckoo mother means overcoming this grief related to her mom. And, in some ways, related to Beth.
Alma’s voicemail
Alma’s too young to understand Gretchen’s mother has passed away. She hears Gretchen leaving messages on the answering machine so assumes the mom must still be around and simply not returning Gretchen’s calls. So Alma secretly calls and leaves a message, asking the mom to call Gretchen back. It’s an act of pure kindness, innocence, compassion, and humanity, and it causes Gretchen to 180 on Alma. She’s no longer a replacement, a cuckoo added to the nest, but someone Gretchen wants to call “sister”. And once that switch flips, Gretchen fights for Alma.
The voicemail is the literal thing. But it represents the general support a loving sister would give and the effort Alma’s made to be a sister to Gretchen. You could show that in any number of ways. Instead of a voicemail, Gretchen finds a letter Alma had sent asking Gretchen’s mom to call. Or say Gretchen’s guitar had broken and she discovers Alma had labeled a jar full of change “new guitar for my sister”. Or if the Hooded Woman had been about to hurt Gretchen and Alma stepped in and protected Gretchen. Etc. etc.
Cuckoo’s ending explained
As much as we’ve focused on Gretchen’s relationship with her sister and mother’s passing, there’s another element. Her relationship with her father. We don’t actually get a final, climactic moment between the two of them in the aftermath of everything. No “I told you so.” No “I’m sorry.” Why?
Because the representational level takes care of it. You don’t need Gretchen to have that last conversation with her father because you have Henry and König right there. They become representative of the father, Luis. Henry’s a grieving widower who promised to protect Gretchen. And König’s connected to Luis’s new life with Beth. Both embody aspects of her father. Who she wants him to be, who she fears him to be. Passing between them, Gretchen leaves them behind, and so leaves the concern for her father behind. She no longer needs his approval, his attention, affection, anything. The same way the defeat of the Hooded Woman represented moving past her mother, Henry and König shooting each other represents moving past the father.
And then riding off with Ed is the final step in this coming of age process. It shows Gretchen’s ready to move on.
For one second, let’s go back to the difference between literal and representational. Earlier when Greetchen tried to leave with Ed, what literally happened is the cuckoo mom, the Hooded Woman, caused Ed to wreck. That seemingly has nothing to do with Gretchen’s grief. But on the representational level, we know the cuckoo mom connects to Gretchen’s unresolved grief. Meaning the crash becomes a metaphor for Gretchen not being in a healthy enough mental state to move on. She hasn’t earned that. However, at the end of Cuckoo, she has had the necessary emotional breakthroughs and catharsis. So leaving with Ed externalizes Gretchen’s capacity to move forward in life.
So at the end you’re not supposed to wonder what will happen to Alma and the implications of Alma, as a cuckoo person, growing up in human society and what could go wrong. Because that’s not what the point of the story is. The point is to appreciate half-sisters becoming full-sisters and Gretchen’s coming of age. I mean, you can wonder about Alma’s future on the literal level, you just won’t get any satisfactory answers from the movie.
Is Cuckoo a coming of age story?
Yeah. Gretchen starts as completely irresponsible and she ends up taking on the role of Alma’s guardian. Remember that Gretchen’s 17. So right at the cusp of adulthood. So you can view the entirety of the movie through the lens of Gretchen going from moody kid to more responsible young adult.
We also see that reflected in Ed’s offering to take Gretchen to Paris. Initially, Gretchen was, on the metaphorical level, too immature to make that journey. But having faced everything she faced, having matured through such dramatic experiences, she’s proved she can take care of herself.
You could even reframe all the stuff with Alma through the coming of age lens. Rejecting Alma as her sister is a very bratty, childish thing to do. Accepting Alma, because Alma’s a sweet, caring person who never meant to cause Gretchen any grief, is the mature thing to do.
That should do it
Re-watch Cuckoo and the experience will be a lot different with all of this in mind. So let’s move on to some last questions and topics.
How old was Ed?
It’s very common for people in their 20s to play teenagers. For example, Hunter Shafer was 23 and played the 17-year-old Gretchen. Ed’s actor was 36. And the character was traveling alone and paying for a hotel alone. So seemingly much older than 17. At best, mid-20s.
How did Ed survive?
Your guess is as good as mine. Between the car crash and the cuckoo mom throwing Ed like a discus, it didn’t seem like she could survive or recover in a few days and be ready to leave. It makes her character feel a bit more like a plot contrivance than a meaningful addition. But Gretchen’s makeout session with Ed does introduce LGBTQ elements to Cuckoo that the film would otherwise lack.
What does Alma represent?
We talked a lot about what Alma means in terms of Gretchen’s story. But there’s an argument for analyzing Alma on her own. She looks like everyone else. But she has a speech handicap and, we find out, is actually a different species of human. When you step back from the literal and look at the representational, Alma is someone who will grow up “feeling different” than her more “normal” peers.
What “different” means is open for interpretation and something individual viewers can dive into on their own. Why? Because Cuckoo doesn’t take a particular stance because the focus isn’t on Alma being different but on Gretchen’s idea of family. As opposed to something like I Saw the TV Glow where the protagonist feeling “different’ is about a particular identity.
What’s the deal with the time loops?
So in real life, cuckoos “have been hypothesized to distract the hosts’ attention from their nests by mimicking the calls of sparrowhawks, a predator of the hosts…. [These researchers] found that female cuckoo calls evoked both populations of the hosts to leave their nests more frequently than did the calls of male cuckoos or doves that do not pose threats to the hosts. This indicated that the call of the female cuckoo functions to deceive the host and thus favors host brood parasitism.”
It seems Tilman Singer researched cuckoos, read about how they use their call in order to deceive potential hosts, and decided to adapt that to something befitting a horror movie. I’d argue the time loop is just something that feels cool and trippy and makes for good marketing, rather than actually meaningful and worth a deeper discussion. Really, I think where it comes from is the idea that female cuckoos play with perception. Singer probably initially thought about some kind of audio mimicry (since that’s what cuckoos do), like the Hooded Woman would sound like Gretchen’s dad in order to trick Gretchen. But that’s very Terminator 2 and not that visually interesting. So instead of doing audio mimicry, he explored the idea of visual mimicry. And that was immediately way cooler.
We see how it works when the teen cuckoo comes for Gretchen after König summons her. The girl is initially outside the room, Gretchen lifts up the mattress, breaks a board, gets ready to defend herself. Then the loop repeats. Except now the cuckoo is entering the room. Gretchen lifts up the mattress, breaks a board, gets ready to defend herself. Then the loop repeats. Except now the cuckoo has lowered herself into the sunken portion of the room (/empty pool?). Gretchen lifts up the mattress, breaks a board, gets ready to defend herself.
In reality, Gretchen would have been standing there with the broken board in her hand, “blind” to the approach of the cuckoo except for when the loop restarted. So it’s not that the cuckoo people actually manipulate time, they just can trigger a visual mimicry that temporarily “traps” their target.
Were Gretchen’s parents in on it?
I don’t think they remembered what happened to them. Otherwise the hospital wouldn’t have to put on the whole song and dance about Alma having seizures and trying to convince the parents it was a medical situation and not part of the cuckoo nestling reacting to its real mom. Luis and Beth would have been more excited to offer Alma up if they had been in on it.
Why did Alma push Gretchen?
Gretchen’s pretending she’ll use a knife on Alma in order to distract the Hooden Woman. She’s also trying to distract Alma from realizing the creepy cuckoo woman is stalking them. So Alma doesn’t quite understand what the situation is. When she sees their reflection, she freaks out, having every reason to think Gretchen may hurt her. So pushes Gretchen then runs away.
What was König doing at the end?
My understanding was that König thought the jig was up and was starting to eradicate people who knew too much and burn records so he could abandon the resort and start over again elsewhere. That’s why he guns down his research doctors. This is one thing where I’d want to see the movie again to make sure. But that was the impression I had. Will update this when I can check.
